Central Connecticut State University is hosting a mathematics contest on April 10th and is inviting Wesleyan (and many other schools) to send a team. Several of our students participated last year, and ranked very highly. In addition to prizes for the top scorers, everyone who participates will receive a Mathematica license. If you are interested in going (it’s about a 20 minutes drive) please contact Professor Pollack (dpollack@wes…) and he will organize some carpools. The announcement from CCSU is below:

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

We invite any and all undergraduates to participate in our regional undergraduate math competition at Central Connecticut State University (CCSU). We have personally extended an invitation to 84 different institutions in Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Every available undergraduate is encouraged to attend.

The competition will be held on 10 April 2010. The test itself will begin promptly at 10am, please try to arrive by 9:30am. Before the test, there will be an explanation of the testing procedures. The event will be taking place in the Willard building, room 210, 211 and 225. In the hall outside of these rooms will be a table staffed by a CCSU faculty member. Every competitor must visit this table for vouchers, testing materials, and to sign in. We humbly request that no one bring any calculators, crib sheets, clothing bearing formulae, books, worked-out problems or anything else that could be construed as an unfair advantage into the test facility. The test is expected to contain either 6 or 8 questions, at least one of which will be solvable by a sophomore in a general math program.

The test will be administered in two parts with half of the questions on the first and the remaining half on the second. Each part will be two hours long. After the first half there will be a one hour break with pizza and soda to help the mind recuperate. The competition will terminate promptly at 3pm and hopefully allow everyone to avoid rush hour traffic on their way home. A faculty committee will grade the tests as quickly as possible. Each of the top three scoring students will receive a TI-Nspire CAS handheld. The TI-Nspires have been provided by Texas Instruments as a means of sponsoring our competition. In the case of a tie, the winner will be selected based upon the elegance of their solution as determined by the committee. The three top scoring contestants from each school will constitute that school’s team and will be ranked according to the arithmetic mean of their scores. The top team will be commemorated on a plaque that will be sent to the Math Department of the victorious school. Again ties will be broken by elegance.

In addition, Wolfram Research has offered to sponsor the event by providing a student license for Mathematica to each participant. We are very grateful for their interest and generosity. Feel free to visit our website at